Hopi Prophecy

Hopi elders appointed Thomas Banyacya in 1948 as one of four interpreters charged with carrying a warning beyond the Hopi to the wider world, a role he carried out for the rest of his life, including an address to the United Nations General Assembly in 1992 and a meeting with the Dalai Lama. The material he and other Hopi spokespeople released for outside audiences describes this as the Fourth World, reached after three earlier worlds ended in destruction, and sets out two paths open to humanity going forward, a road of technology without spiritual balance leading to ruin, and a road of harmony with the natural world.

Signs said to mark the approach of a period of purification include the arrival of light-skinned people who would claim the land as their own, "cobwebs" strung across the land and sky, and rivers of stone built across the earth, details Hopi spokespeople have themselves matched to European colonisation, telegraph and telephone wires, and paved highways. The most frequently quoted sign describes a "gourd of ashes" that would fall from the sky, capable of boiling the ocean and burning the land for many years, a warning Hopi spokespeople have read since 1945 as a description of nuclear weapons, a reading given particular weight by the Hopi reservation's proximity, within the same state, to the Los Alamos laboratory and the Trinity test site.

The most widely read printed account, Frank Waters' 1963 Book of the Hopi, was compiled by a non-Hopi author working with a small number of Hopi collaborators, chief among them the translator Oswald "White Bear" Fredericks. Hopi religious knowledge is not held by a single central authority; it is distributed across clans and ceremonial societies, each keeping its own portion, much of it not meant to circulate outside its own membership or even to other Hopi outside it. Anthropologist Peter Whiteley's scholarship on Hopi ethnography has questioned how representative the handful of voices behind Waters' book were of that wider, deliberately uncentralised structure, and some Hopi people have distanced themselves from both the book and from the free-standing, ceremonially stripped version of "the prophecy" that circulates in popular and New Age sources.

This entry describes only material that named Hopi messengers, principally Banyacya, chose to release for outside audiences, and does not attempt to reconstruct any restricted clan or ceremonial content that was not offered for publication. Even the released material passed through selection and translation for an outside audience; the fuller context in which it sits remains inside Hopi religious life and is not represented here.

Sources Book of the HopiFrank Waters, with Oswald "White Bear" Fredericks with Rethinking Hopi EthnographyPeter M. Whiteley